Qualla: Hoedjiespunt

Hoedjiespunt: Introduction

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Profberger at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. A road grader did what 280,000 years of wind and weather had not. Sometime before the early 1990s, construction crews cutting a road on a peninsula near Saldanha Bay sliced into a fossilized sand dune and scattered ancient bone across the disturbed ground. The bones had been sealed beneath a calcrete formation since the Middle Pleistocene, preserved inside what had once been the lair of a brown hyena dug into the side of a dune overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. When the site later yielded the teeth and skull fragments of a juvenile hominin, Hoedjiespunt joined a small constellation of sites along South Africa's West Coast that are rewriting the story of early human presence in this part of Africa.

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Image: Profberger at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hoedjiespunt: A Hyena's Pantry

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Profberger at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The original occupant of the Hoedjiespunt site was not human. Brown hyenas are prolific collectors of bone, dragging carcasses back to their dens and gnawing them over weeks or months. The result, over time, is an accumulation of skeletal material from a wide range of species -- ...

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Image: Profberger at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hoedjiespunt: The Tooth That Changed Everything

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Profberger at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1993, a single fossilized hominin tooth was found in fragments eroding from the deposit's surface. It was enough to justify a full excavation. What followed recovered many thousands of fossils, and among them were more human remains: additional teeth, skull fragments, and a ti...

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Image: Profberger at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Hoedjiespunt: Deep Time on the West Coast

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Profberger at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Hoedjiespunt does not stand alone. It is part of a corridor of Middle Pleistocene sites along the West Coast -- Elandsfontein with the Saldanha cranium, the Langebaan footprints preserved in ancient dune rock, and several other fossil localities that together paint a picture of s...

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Image: Profberger at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0